How to make sure search engines can read your site
Search engines find your website using small programs called “robots” or “spiders” that search the Internet for new content. These are busy little beavers, continually scouring the internet for the latest and greatest information. If you know how to serve them, you will get your site noticed by the search engines.
First of all, there’s one concept you can’t go wrong with: the more human-friendly your site is, the more search engine-friendly it will be. I will mention this in several tutorials.
It’s pretty simple: search engine spiders try to view every website they come across as if they were humans. If something is good or useful to a human visitor, a search engine will give it a better ranking. This is what I mean…
Humans like fresh content: Human visitors like to read new content. If you put new pages and text on your website regularly, people will visit your site more often to read it.
Likewise, the more often you update and add new content, the more often search engines will search your site and index your new content. If you post new stories to your blog a few times a week, Google might visit your site once a week to see what’s new and add it to their search results. Google will visit larger sites (such as CNN.com) multiple times a day because the website is continually updated throughout the day.
Therefore, in order for your website to be regularly visited by a spider, you need to update your site as often as possible. If you stop adding new content for 6 six months, a spider will act like a human visitor would: it will visit less and less frequently until it stops visiting altogether.
Make content accessible: Humans like being able to find new content. If you create a new page and put a link from your home page to that new page, it’s easy for people to find the new page. Whereas if you put a new page on your site but don’t link to it, human visitors can’t find that page.
Spiders also find content by following links. Once you have a new page on your site, you’ll want to make sure there’s a link to the new content so a spider can find it.
One thing you can do to make sure search engines visit all the important pages on your site is to create a sitemap. A sitemap is simply a list of links to each of the important pages on your site. To see an example, visit http://www.myezbills.com. This is a former client of mine, and if you look in the bottom right corner you’ll see a “sitemap” link.
A search engine that finds this link will quickly access all the pages of the website. The spider may just go down the list. A sitemap is also useful for your human visitors. If someone can’t find the information they’re looking for, a quick visit to the sitemap can point them in the right direction.
outgoing links: If you are giving a human visitor useful information, you would probably link to other resources on the Internet that would also be useful for your visitors to visit. If you have a lot of content, you are expected to include links that leave your site.
Without outbound links, it becomes a stagnant “Dead Sea” website: links go in but not out. Since links to other resources outside of your site are useful to humans, search engine spiders want to see them on your site.